Building an Enterprise-Wide Spatial Information Intergration Platform
The Reality
In “The Last Crusade”, just as our hero’s hand encircles the long-awaited prize, forces beyond his control wrest the cup from him and leave him not only empty-handed, but also with the immediate problem of how to escape from imminent disaster.
Similarly, we in the GIS profession find our sweet daydreams of universal, transaction-based spatial and attribute data management interrupted with the cold, hard reality of spatial and attribute data that spans the spectrum of quality, accessibility and data formats. Most spatial data today is still file-based, is not cross-referenced (tagged) to attribute data and is not object-oriented, to say nothing of it being topologically “correct” (whatever that means to you). Moreover spatial data resides in a variety of formats, almost all of which are proprietary. Worse yet, there is no standard mechanism that exists for querying spatial data from these spatial data sources. There are no SQLs, or ODBCs in our world. Ours is a world where chaos reigns.
The People
In Indiana Jones’ world, there were basically two kinds of people: good and evil. In our world, there are likewise two kinds of people: GIS people (enlightened) and everyone else (unlearned). GIS people know about things like coordinate systems, projections, topology and georeferencing (and lots of other big words). The unlearned concern themselves with documents, spreadsheets, databases, reports and the like.
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